Is she not some singular exception among the people of her country; some abnormal product, an accidental grace, a growth of luxuriant richness in a deadly soil, or, at least, is she not like Jenny Lind among singers?  Surely we shall not look upon her like again.  It would be difficult to find even here at the North,—­the humane North, nay, even among those who have solemnly consecrated themselves as “the friends of the slave,” and who “remember them that are in bonds as bound with them,”—­a heart more loving and good, affections more natural and pure.  I am surprised.  This was a slave-babe.  Its mother was this lady’s slave.  I am confused.  This contradicts my previous information; it sets at nought my ideas upon a subject which I believed I thoroughly understood.

A little negro slave-babe, it seems, is dead, and its owner and mistress is acting and speaking as Northerners do!  Yes, as Northerners do even when their own daughters’ babes lie dead!

The letter must be a forgery.  No; here it is before me, in the handwriting of the lady, post-marked at the place of her residence.  But is it not, after all, a fiction?  I can believe almost anything sooner than that I am mistaken in the opinions and feelings which are contradicted by this letter.  In the spirit of Hume’s argument against the miracles of the Bible, I feel disposed, almost, to urge that it would be a greater miracle that the course of nature at the South in a slave-holder’s heart should thus be set aside than that there should not be, in some way, deception about this letter.  But still, here is the letter; and it is written to her father, whom she could not deceive, whom she had no motive, no wish, to delude.  Had it been written to a Northerner, I could have surmised that she was attempting to make false impressions about slavery, and its influence on the slave-holder.  Why should she tell her father this simple tale, unless real affection for the babe and its mother were impelling her?  This tries my faith.  It is like an undesigned coincidence in holy writ, which used so to stagger my unbelief.  Possibly, however,—­for I must maintain my previous convictions if I can,—­possibly her father is such as our anti-slavery lecturers and writers declare a slave-holder naturally to be, and his daughter, herself a mother, is seeking to touch his heart and turn him from his cruelties as a slave-holder by showing him, in this indirect, beautiful manner, that slave-mothers have the feelings of human beings.  Perhaps I may therefore compromise this matter by allowing, on one hand, that the daughter is all that she appears to be, and claiming, on the other, that the father is all that a slave-holder ought to be to verify our Northern theories.  But she herself is a slave-holder, and therefore by our theory she ought to be imbruted.  I beg her pardon, and that of her father; but they must consider how hard it is for us at the North to conquer all our prejudices even under the influence